Pub Date : 2019-11-13DOI: 10.5325/pacicoasphil.54.2.0220
D. Dietrich
Abstract:Given that documentary methodologies are situated within a digital media ecology today, this article considers the ramifications of social justice films that purport to establish emancipatory truth claims in an era of "fake news." In addition to treating documentary filmmaking as a methodology, rather than a discrete film genre, this article demonstrates the ways in which participatory media culture is reshaping what gets defined as "truth" and how it is achieved. Looking specifically at racial justice themes in Ava DuVernay's 13th, this article observes how documentary rhetorics are part of a larger media ecology that includes Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Perhaps a defining feature of our cultural moment--at the same time that there is great suspicion regarding the relationship of images to "truth," there is also a great need and desire to establish non-racist narratives to counter the hegemonic historiography that passes for the "real" in U.S. culture. This article demonstrates how social justice documentarians are stepping up to the challenge.
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Pub Date : 2019-11-13DOI: 10.5325/pacicoasphil.54.2.0180
E. Aykol
Abstract:This article focuses on the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon's collaborative work with the Bosnian-Canadian visual artist Velibor Božović. Hemon's The Lazarus Project (2008), which features Božović photographs, and their multimedial e-book My Prisoner (2015), illustrate how the Bosnian Civil War is remembered collaboratively by Bosnian writers and artists in the diaspora. The article calls the form of remembering that emerges from these collaborative projects diplopic. Appropriated from diplopia (double vision), that is, the disorienting ophthalmic condition of perceiving simultaneously two images of a single object, diplopic remembering is posited as a recurring metaphor for how the past is recollected and reconstructed in Hemon and Božović's collaborative work. It helps the reader navigate a textual terrain where past and present, fact and fiction are conflated. Diplopic remembering captures the experience of being re-exposed to traumatic memories and what trans- and intragenerational remembering looks like when the recall and transmission are mediated with images that are left behind and through the testimonies of those with firsthand accounts. In these two collaborative projects, diplopic remembering is the operative mode of remembering that aspires to bridge the past and present and narrow down the schism between diaspora Bosnians with firsthand and secondhand memories.
{"title":"Diplopic Remembering in Aleksandar Hemon and Velibor Božović's Collaborative Work","authors":"E. Aykol","doi":"10.5325/pacicoasphil.54.2.0180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.54.2.0180","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article focuses on the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon's collaborative work with the Bosnian-Canadian visual artist Velibor Božović. Hemon's The Lazarus Project (2008), which features Božović photographs, and their multimedial e-book My Prisoner (2015), illustrate how the Bosnian Civil War is remembered collaboratively by Bosnian writers and artists in the diaspora. The article calls the form of remembering that emerges from these collaborative projects diplopic. Appropriated from diplopia (double vision), that is, the disorienting ophthalmic condition of perceiving simultaneously two images of a single object, diplopic remembering is posited as a recurring metaphor for how the past is recollected and reconstructed in Hemon and Božović's collaborative work. It helps the reader navigate a textual terrain where past and present, fact and fiction are conflated. Diplopic remembering captures the experience of being re-exposed to traumatic memories and what trans- and intragenerational remembering looks like when the recall and transmission are mediated with images that are left behind and through the testimonies of those with firsthand accounts. In these two collaborative projects, diplopic remembering is the operative mode of remembering that aspires to bridge the past and present and narrow down the schism between diaspora Bosnians with firsthand and secondhand memories.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46750992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-13DOI: 10.5325/pacicoasphil.54.2.0252
Kathleen Lundeen
Abstract:In The Prelude, William Wordsworth explores the complexity of seeing, in light of the density of filters through which we access the world, and invites the question of whether literature and art, as mediators, enable or subvert the moral witnessing of crises. In the course of his exploration, he declares the eye to be the "most despotic" of the senses, which reveals that the problem of mediation goes well beyond the presence of cultural filters. This article enters the ongoing conversation on the politics of mediation by presenting Wordsworth's epic as a postmodern experiment on whether it is possible to know existence free of filters and whether such an aspiration serves the interests of humanity.
{"title":"Wordsworth's Despotic Eye","authors":"Kathleen Lundeen","doi":"10.5325/pacicoasphil.54.2.0252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.54.2.0252","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In The Prelude, William Wordsworth explores the complexity of seeing, in light of the density of filters through which we access the world, and invites the question of whether literature and art, as mediators, enable or subvert the moral witnessing of crises. In the course of his exploration, he declares the eye to be the \"most despotic\" of the senses, which reveals that the problem of mediation goes well beyond the presence of cultural filters. This article enters the ongoing conversation on the politics of mediation by presenting Wordsworth's epic as a postmodern experiment on whether it is possible to know existence free of filters and whether such an aspiration serves the interests of humanity.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41858510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The thirteen interdisciplinary essays assembled in this volume demonstrate that transatlantic German Studies scholars are at the forefront of cultural studies research on the Anthropocene, the period in the last two hundred years in which human activity has significantly changed the earth. The contributors, all affiliated with the main German center for environmental humanities scholarship, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, offer innovative examinations of German-language literature, film, photography, philosophy, illustrated periodicals, critical theory, and locations. The essays address how this new geological period was anticipated and represented in literature and art, and they explore the Anthropocene’s meaning for aesthetics, poetics, politics, and scientific knowledge. The interpretations thus underscore the varied ways cultural products reflect on how humans have changed the planet, and the contributors do not neglect the role of non-human agency and representations in the works they examine. The editors’ introduction, Sabine Wilke’s chapter “Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene: An Ethics and Poetics for a New Geological Age,” and the epilogue complement one another quite nicely; it pays off to start reading the book with these three sections. There is not a lengthy overview of theory and research in the Anthropocene at the beginning of the book; concise definitions of the Anthropocene are given and the arguments of the individual chapters are previewed. If we look to the penultimate chapter, Wilke lays out the stakes the contributors have been making throughout the volume in writing about German cultural production in the Anthropocene. She urges German Studies
{"title":"Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond ed. by Sabine Wilke, Japhet Johnstone (review)","authors":"Vance Byrd","doi":"10.5040/9781501307782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501307782","url":null,"abstract":"The thirteen interdisciplinary essays assembled in this volume demonstrate that transatlantic German Studies scholars are at the forefront of cultural studies research on the Anthropocene, the period in the last two hundred years in which human activity has significantly changed the earth. The contributors, all affiliated with the main German center for environmental humanities scholarship, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, offer innovative examinations of German-language literature, film, photography, philosophy, illustrated periodicals, critical theory, and locations. The essays address how this new geological period was anticipated and represented in literature and art, and they explore the Anthropocene’s meaning for aesthetics, poetics, politics, and scientific knowledge. The interpretations thus underscore the varied ways cultural products reflect on how humans have changed the planet, and the contributors do not neglect the role of non-human agency and representations in the works they examine. The editors’ introduction, Sabine Wilke’s chapter “Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene: An Ethics and Poetics for a New Geological Age,” and the epilogue complement one another quite nicely; it pays off to start reading the book with these three sections. There is not a lengthy overview of theory and research in the Anthropocene at the beginning of the book; concise definitions of the Anthropocene are given and the arguments of the individual chapters are previewed. If we look to the penultimate chapter, Wilke lays out the stakes the contributors have been making throughout the volume in writing about German cultural production in the Anthropocene. She urges German Studies","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47867558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-26DOI: 10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.54.1.0020
Sarah Bernthal
Abstract:Female narratives and female bodies run considerable risks within the Lais of Marie de France. Just as stories seek to stave off oblivion and forgetfulness, bodies run the risk of being torn apart. In Laüstic, Marie de France draws a parallel between female bodies and the texts and textiles that women fabricate to tell their stories. Through skillful and subtle descriptions of blood, clothing, and color, Marie creates a sense of homology between the body of the lady and the body of the bird that gives its name to the story. This allows her to posit acts of writing and sewing as metaphors for regenerating the mutilated female body. This article aims to show that in opposition to Ovid, Marie de France imagines a poetics that can piece the female body back together. She thereby challenges and reinvents Ovid’s version of the Philomela myth. In Laüstic, the act of sewing becomes symbolic of recovering communication and of allowing Philomela’s tongue to return to her body.
摘要：女性叙事和女性身体在法国玛丽家族中面临着相当大的风险。正如故事试图避免遗忘和遗忘一样，身体也有被撕裂的风险。在Laüstic中，Marie de France将女性的身体与女性为讲述自己的故事而编造的文本和纺织品进行了比较。通过对血液、衣服和颜色的巧妙而微妙的描述，玛丽在女士的身体和为故事命名的鸟的身体之间创造了一种同源感。这使她能够将写作和缝纫行为视为再生残缺女性身体的隐喻。这篇文章旨在表明，与奥维德相反，玛丽·德·弗朗斯想象了一种能够将女性身体拼凑在一起的诗学。因此，她挑战并重新创造了奥维德版本的菲洛梅拉神话。在Laüstic，缝纫行为象征着恢复沟通，让菲洛梅拉的舌头回到她的身体。
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Pub Date : 2019-04-26DOI: 10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.54.1.0074
Angela Ridinger-Dotterman
Abstract:Though Beverly Cleary was a prolific author of children’s literature over the second half of the twentieth century, her fiction has largely escaped critical attention. This article examines the author’s representation of economic insecurity across her Ramona series, arguing that the economy functions as a dynamic setting that mirrors changes in the US economy throughout the fifty years the series was written. Reading the novels through a social-historical lens illuminates the ways in which Cleary’s novels are simultaneously timeless and firmly rooted in their social contexts. Influenced by her own childhood experiences of economic insecurity, Cleary explores the emotional effect family financial struggles have on children within the context of otherwise “light” fiction. Attending to Cleary’s treatment of the economy in her novels reveals the ways in which the author used her fiction to take on the work of authorial alloparenting, normalizing the experience of economic insecurity within families, and modeling personal resilience in the face of difficult circumstances.
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Pub Date : 2019-04-26DOI: 10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.54.1.0056
Takayuki Yokota-Murakami
Abstract:Translation in its typically modern, “Western” format relies on the primacy of a signified, construed as an act of correctly reconstructing the original signified from the (derivative) signifier. This essentially Cartesian conception has been retained even in the critical analysis of translation of literary works, especially by the scholars of the “American school” of comparative literature. Such an approach valorizes communication and fetishizes the source text and the author. A radically different model of a (source) text is presented by linked poetry in medieval Japan, in which a stanza is constantly re-interpreted by a poet who composes a sequential stanza in a dislodging manner so that no part of the text has one, fixed meaning. Hence, Naoki Sakai defines Japanese linked poetry as a “translational” text. In his explication of a “translational text,” Sakai refers to a Korean-(Japanese/)American novel as well. While Earl Miner’s rendering of haika and renga successfully captures their spirit of indeterminacy of a meaning by refraining from giving definite signifieds to the translated stanzas, post-colonial texts also typically feature “translatedness” of a text. By examining Japanese linked poetry and postcolonial literature, this article explores the ways to deconstruct the Cartesian model of translation.
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